Review by Kirkus Book Review
An examination of the effects of gun violence in marginalized neighborhoods. "If you're Black and grew up in an inner-city neighborhood in this country," writes Grio enterprise reporter Bates, "it's virtually impossible not to be affected by the crime and gun violence that goes on, either directly or through your family and friends." Gun violence, he adds, is constant in poor neighborhoods, rural but especially urban--18,000 people were killed by guns between January and June 2022, disproportionately in the poor urban context. There are multiple causes for this violence: Poverty comes with its own set of hurdles, and the fact that everyone, it seems, is carrying a firearm reflects the need for protection, which in turn feeds into the fact that police simply aren't bothering to patrol in many marginalized communities. It doesn't help that many neighborhoods are overrun by warring gangs. Furthermore, the author writes, the statistics are often misleading. For example, measuring by deaths per 100,000 people blurs the fact that Mississippi had 576 homicides in 2020 against Chicago's 769; in that case, "more people are dying in some cities than in entire states." A precipitating factor was the pandemic, which "didn't make [poor] communities bad; it just further destabilized the poor structures that already existed in them." In an evenhanded discussion that will likely stir some controversy because of its emphasis on intraracial violence, Bates proposes several remedies: Gun laws must be strengthened, the police need to step up and do their work with the community's backing, and more training needs to be offered in "violence prevention," a dangerous but effective intervention. "The big takeaway I hope people grasp," he writes in closing, "is that there is no one solution to gun violence." A well-reasoned analysis of gun violence as it plays out on the city streets. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
